women’s autobiographies and relationship to the world/quand les femmes s’écrivent dans le monde
International conference on women’s autobiographies, 14-15 October 2016
Research group FAAAM, University of Paris Ouest Nanterre
Writing herself in the World: Women’s autobiography and relationship to the world
Co Organisers Claire Bazin and Corinne Bigot, Research group Faaam
keynote speaker: Victoria Stewart, University of Leicester
Dr Stewart’s research interests include the twentieth-century and contemporary novel, war writing and life-writing. She has particular interests in the representation of the First and Second World Wars (including the Holocaust) in both fiction and autobiography. Her book Women’s Autobiography: War and Trauma (Palgrave, 2003) considered the work of writers including Vera Brittain, Virginia Woolf and Anne Frank from the perspective of trauma theory. Narratives of Memory: British Writing of the 1940s (Palgrave, 2006) examines a range of novels and short fiction from this decade, by authors such as Elizabeth Bowen, Graham Greene and Patrick Hamilton, focusing in particular on their depiction of the processes of memory. Dr Stewart’s most recent monograph, The Second World War in Contemporary British Fiction: Secret Histories (Edinburgh University Press, 2011), considers the use of secrecy as both a trope and a narrative device in recent fictional treatments of the war.
programme
FRIDAY OCTOBER 14th
Bâtiment V ground floor (room V14)
9am-9.20 – Coffee & registration in conference room (V14)
9.20 – Opening Address by Professor Cornelius Crowley
WANDERING AND SELF WRITING
Chair: Nathalie Saudo Welby
9.30-10 Stephanie Genty (Université d’Evry) : ‘The Table in the Corner’: Wandering and Writing in Patti Smith’s M Train (2015).
10-10.30 Catherine Morgan Proux (Université Blaise Pascal, Clermont 2) : Autobiography, Memoir and Travel Writing: Ella Maillart’s The Cruel Way (1947).
10.30-11 Pin-chia Feng (National Chiao Tung University (NCTU), Taiwan) : Culinary and Tourist Memories: Representing Sensecapes in Leslie Li’s Daughter of Heaven.
11-11.20 Coffee break
WRITING & SURVIVAL (1)
Chair: Claire Bazin
11.20-11.50 Pnina Rosenberg (Technion, Haifa and Jezreel Valley Academic College, Israel) : Writing herself into the Camp World: Ewa Gabanyi’s Autographic Work Almanac of Memories Auschwitz-Rajsko Concentration Camp, 1944.
11.50-12.20 Rosalie Ghanem (Université Sorbonne Nouvelle Paris 3) : Histoire et mémoire dans la construction de l’héroïne méditerranéenne dans La guerre m’a surprise à Beyrouth de Carmen Boustani.
Lunch 12.30-2pm (bât V 1st floor)
WRITING & SURVIVAL (2)
2pm-3pm Keynote speaker : Dr. Victoria Stewart (University of Leicester) : “This was the present then. This was true.” Diaries, Autobiography and History.
3-3.20 Coffee break
FRAGMENTED SELVES
Chair: Stephanie Genty
3.20-3.50 Héloise Thomas (Université de Bordeaux Montaigne) : “Mother, you are eighteen years old”: Female Lineage, Fractured Nationalities, and Formal Experimentation in Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s DICTEE.
3.50-4.20 Shanon Finck (University of West Georgia) : ‘Not a shade passing’: Meditations on Aging in Patti Smith’s M Train and Christine Brooke-Rose’s Remake.
4.20-4.50 Rodolphe Gauthier (Université Paris IV-Sorbonne) : Du matériau autobiographique au discours politique : la question des représentations dans l’essai King Kong Théorie de Virginie Despentes.
SATURDAY OCTOBER 15th Bâtiment V ground floor Room V14
THE SELF TRANSCENDED
Chair: Nicoleta Alexoae-Zagni
10am-10.30 Elisabeth Bouzonviller (Université Jean Monnet, Saint Etienne) : From Self-Writing to National Re-Writing in Louise Erdrich’s Autobiographical Essays.
10.30-11 Karima Zaaraoui (Université Paris 3 Sorbonne Nouvelle) : Related by herself: Mary Prince’s ‘Herstory’.
11-11.30 Sandra Dufour (Université de Bourgogne) : Correspondence between Lucy Stone and Antoinette Brown Blackwell: Shared Autobiographies and Consciousness-Raising in the 19th century in the United States.
11.30- 11.50 Coffee Break
THE RELATIONAL SELF
Chair: Corinne Bigot
11.50- 12.20 Floriane Reviron-Piegay (Université de Saint Etienne) : “Our lives are pieces in a pattern”: Virginia Woolf’s Autobiographical Fragments or the “anxiety of influence.
12.20-12.50 Hajer Elarem (The Higher Institute of applied Languages of Moknine, Tunisia) : The Relational Self In Doris Lessing’s Autobiography: Knowing the Self through the (m)other.
Lunch 1pm-2pm (bât V 1st floor)
MEMORY, SPACE AND THE BODY (1)
Chair: Corinne Bigot
2-2.30 Eleanora Rao (University of Salerno): “I looked with wonder at the tall houses, the paved streets, the street lamps.” Rose Cohen’s Out of the Shadow: A Russian Jewish Girlhood on the Lower East Side
2.30-3 Anissa Talahite-Moodley (University of Toronto) : Gender, Race and the Question of Autobiographical Authenticity.
3-3.30 Amaryllis Gacioppo (University of Bologna (Italy), and Monash University (Australia) : Cartography of Emotion: Embodying Personal History through Psychogeographical Methodologies (Rebecca Solnit’s A Field Guide to Getting Lost and A Book of Migrations).
3.30-3.50 Coffee break
MEMORY, SPACE AND THE BODY (2)
Chair: Valérie Baisnée
3.50-4.20 Sophie L. Riemenschneider (City University of New York): “Girly Things”: The Use of Mnemonic Objects in Breast Cancer Narratives.
4.20-4.50 Maria Tamboukou (University of East London): Writing the Memory of Work: Aesthetics Politics and the Archive.
4.50-5.20 Dilek Direnc (Ege University, Izmir, Turkey) Poetics and Politics of Self and Place in Terry Tempest Williams’ Refuge.
“Our sweetest existence is both relative and collective, and our true self does not reside solely within us,” Jean-Jacques Rousseau wrote in Rousseau, Judge of Jean-Jacques. If autobiography is indeed the reflective act of a remembering self, this self is never an isolated subject and the world is never only a mere stage set for reminiscing. Sociologist Maurice Halbwachs wrote, “we never remember alone.” Are not the interior and the exterior worlds simply two faces of the same reality? Annie Ernaux, who borrowed Rousseau’s phrase in her Journal du dehors/ Exteriors, introduces herself as “crossed by people and their existence like a whore,” since her relationship to the world is not only an objective of her mind, but a physical and erotic link too.
Relying on Nancy Chodorov’s argument that feminine personality tended to define itself in relation and connection to other people more than masculine personality did, Mary Mason (1980) stressed that female identity was grounded in relationship and produced textual representations that contrasted with masculine self-representations. In her seminal essay, “Women’ Autobiographical Selves, Theory and Practice”, Susan Stanford Friedman, who posited that women had more flexible ego boundaries, laid emphasis on women’s relationality and community, as demonstrated by African American female autobiographies.
In How Our Lives Become Stories: Making Selves (1999), Paul John Eakin encourages us to demystify the self-referential narrative seen as autodiegetic, where the first person subject would first and foremost refer to itself. Eakin states that the first person of autobiography is truly plural in its origins and subsequent formation. He proposes the terms “relational self” and “relational life,” arguing that all identity is relational and all self-writing is at the crossroads of biography and autobiography, which positions the narrating subject in a larger context—that of the family, the community and the ethnic group. A writing of inwardness may also be perceived as an inscription of otherness and of “formerness.” To write is not only to become an individual, but also to recognize the presence of others in the making of the self.
Autobiography, which is traditionally associated with a certain subjective idealism, is not expected to fully engage with the world, while memoirs, a genre preferred by Anglo Saxon women, position the writing subjects in a larger environment. As Nancy Miller insisted, memoirs do not draw a clear line between the public and the private since emphasizing the role of the outside world amounts to some socio-political, cultural or ethical risk. It means inhabiting and reappropriating the public space, becoming visible, sharing one’s experience and offering a reflection on history and society. For Helen M. Buss, memoirs are not only representations of women’s personal lives but also of their desire to repossess important parts of our culture, in which women’s stories have not mattered.
From this perspective, the autobiographical project is akin to sociology or history, which it completes without replacing. What historical value can we attribute to autobiography? What is the relation between autobiography and cultural memory? Between autobiography and counter-memory? Autobiography and photography?
Beyond the traditional (written) forms of autobiographical narrative, we are interested in other, more contemporary, forms of autobiographical projects.
Several themes may be explored:
1) The autobiographical narrative as testimony/reappropriation/intervention: how do women participate as witnesses of their time? What narrative strategies do they use to combine/separate/mix individual and collective discourses, private and public discourses? How do women write narratives of historical events or of “conditions of being”? Specific genres such as war stories or slave narratives could be studied.
2) Autobiography and ‘postmemory’ (Hirsch): when second or third generations recount the trauma (war, exile, decolonization, poverty) endured by previous generations in diasporic memoirs, or working class memoirs (Jeanette Winterson, Carolyn Steedman).
3) The places of memory: what is the relation of women’s autobiography to space-time? How is the place of memory represented (cf the garden world of Jamaica Kincaid in My Garden (Book))? What role does it play in the construction of the narrative identity in narratives of exile and of migration, such as ethnic culinary memoirs (Myriam’s Kitchen)? How are the conditions of being part of several worlds and of the postcolonial self expressed?
4) Autobiography in the world’s web: the Self in the virtual world. Do on-line journals increase our connectedness to the world or do they leave us more isolated?
5) Autobiography and the image of (the self in the) world: the referentiality of images tested against writing (photographs inserted into the autobiographical text as visual transmission / mediation between the self and the world, graphic memoirs, etc…); the intersection between personal, political and photographic autobiographies (Jo Spence)
Papers will be given in English (preferred language) or French
200-400 word abstracts (and short bios) to be sent by June 15th 2016 to the co-organizers:
Claire Bazin cbaz1@wanadoo.fr and Corinne Bigot corinne.bigot@wanadoo.fr
Nicoleta Alexoae-Zagni, Istom, CREA Paris Ouest
Valérie Baisnée, Université de Paris Sud, CREA Paris Ouest
Valérie Baudier, CREA, Paris Ouest
Claire Bazin, CREA, Paris Ouest Nanterre
Corinne Bigot, CREA, Paris Ouest Nanterre
Elisabeth Bouzonviller, Université de Saint Etienne
Stéphanie Genty, SLAM, Université d’Evry-Val d’Essonne
Nathalie Saudo-Welby, CORPUS Université de Picardie Jules Verne
Bibliography
Buss, Helen M. Repossessing the World: Reading Memoirs by Contemporary Women. Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2002.
Mason, Mary “The Other Voice: Autobiographies by Women Writers” Autobiography, ed James Olney. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1980.
Eakin, John Paul. How Our Lives Become Stories: Making Selves. Cornell University Press, 1999.
Touching the World: Reference in Autobiography. Princeton University Press, 1992.
Ernaux, Annie, Exteriors. Seven Stories Press, 1996.
Friedman, Susan Stanford, “Women’s Autobiographical Selves”, in The Private Self: Theory and Practice of Women’s Autobiographical Writings, ed Shari Benstock. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina Press, 1988, p.34-62.
Halbwachs, Maurice. La Mémoire collective. Paris: Albin Michel, 1997.
Hirsch, Marianne and Smith, Valerie (eds). “Feminism and Cultural Memory: An Introduction.” Signs, Vol. 28, No. 1, Gender and Cultural Memory Special Issue (Autumn 2002): 1-19.
Hirsch, Marianne, Family Frames: Photography Narrative and Postmemory, Harvard UP, 1997.
“Past Lives: Postmemories in Exile”, Poetics Today, Vol. 17, No. 4 (1996): 659-690.
Miller, Nancy K. Bequest & Betrayal: Memoirs of a Parent’s Death. Oxford UP, 1996.
Ricœur, Paul. La mémoire, l’histoire, l’oubli. Paris: Seuil, 2000.
Turkle, Sherry. Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other. New York: Basic Books, 2011.
Whitlock Gillian, Soft Weapons: Autobiography in Transit, The University of Washington Press, 2007.
Zanon-Davis, Natalie and Randoph Starn, “Introduction,” Representations 26, Special Issue: “Memory and Counter-Memory” (1989):1-6.